I just spent a fun hour and a half with Rahul bashing on the Fedora 12 Beta announcement text, trying to keep it as short and readable as possible while highlighting as many of the awesome new features in Fedora 12 as we could. It was a great way to get some of the great stuff we’re bringing into this release clear in my head, and it makes me even more excited about the release! Just the topic headings are enough to whet your appetite:

I’m especially happy about the PulseAudio changes that land in this release (and, to be fair to our erstwhile fellow distributions, in Mandriva 2010 and Ubuntu 9.10 as well, for the most part). Awesome features like having any audio device on your system show up to any UPnP client as a UPnP server – any audio being played on that device will automatically play on the client – and great Bluetooth integration – so any Bluetooth audio device you pair with will show up as a device in PulseAudio just like any other card in your system – really help to tell the PulseAudio story. These are the kinds of things that either just never got done or got done in really unusable, half-assed ways before we had PulseAudio, and now it’s as easy as crashing my phone is this evening (and believe me, that’s pretty easy). Fantastic job by all the PA developers.

Hi! We’ve great interest in your kde-pulseaudio integration work, but we found out about it a bit late in the f12 development cycle to be able to integrate in time for the final release.

Once the release craziness subsides or at least when we can catch a bit of free time, we will most certainly help build on the work you’ve started (integrating patches, testing, showering you with tokens of our appreciation, etc…).

colin: I know our KDE guys are fans of them; I’m not sure if they decided to include them in F12 or if they noticed the changes too late and they’ll only be in F13. But we’re definitely aware of them and the general opinion is that they’re Good Stuff 🙂